Wes, as a community leader, proven to have a level head on your shoulders, can we please hear your unedited opinion, unadorned with sugary toppings?

With the almost complete absence of whoops and hurrays, I can imagine that you aren't running around with an abundance of smiles today. How do you intend to get all of us to cross over the line you (the company and/or shareholders) have chalked out?

This hurts me in so many ways... I made my substance live perpetual some time ago, I was just about to renew the suscription once more..... and now I don´t know what to do. Should I? or not? What the hell guys? If all of us, the users, the fans of allegorithmic philosophy, the EPIC customer service are worried, or sad, or angry...

Lots of reasons to be concerned about this, given what's happened with many other companies undergoing similar acquisitions in the past.

Reading through these 17 pages of comments, it's clear there is a lot of anger, especially about the licensing situation. Truth is, we don't know what will happen with that, not yet.

What I want to know is: why should we be excited about this?

I don't mean that in a rhetorical, facetious manner. I literally mean, why should we be excited?

Allegorithmic staff in this thread are basically just trying to pacify and put out fires about licensing. Why don't you expound on why this is a good thing? Let's give them the benefit of the doubt, not just assume that they've been tempted to potentially fuck up their entire creative ecosystem just for the sake of some extra cash for the executives: there might be some really good, creative reasons for this merger. What are they?

In other words, what benefits will all this bring to the Substance suite of tools? Because I feel like that question hasn't really be answered.

Wes, as a community leader, proven to have a level head on your shoulders, can we please hear your unedited opinion, unadorned with sugary toppings?

Aren't we expecting a little too much of an employee who needs a salary to feed his family? It's not Wes' turn to speak about this decision as he probably had no stake in it.These are top level decisions - so the CTO/CEOs are the ones to address this question to.

Reading through these 17 pages of comments, it's clear there is a lot of anger, especially about the licensing situation. Truth is, we don't know what will happen with that, not yet.

Adobe released a press-release stating it will become part of Adobe Creative Cloud, to offer the full power it has to their already existing designer user base.

Quote

Aren't we expecting a little too much of an employee who needs a salary to feed his family? It's not Wes' turn to speak about this decision as he probably had no stake in it.These are top level decisions - so the CTO/CEOs are the ones to address this question to.

If someone who has our respect can calm people down and offer a better insight, Wes is someone who can... That's all.

Blizzard merged with Activision because they wanted to focus on making great games while letting the publisher take care of all the financial decisions. Look how that turned out. Diablo:Immortals wasn't even made in-house, it was outsourced. Most of the core team left the company long ago, constant budget cuts even made the entire e-sport scene disappear.

Wes, as a community leader, proven to have a level head on your shoulders, can we please hear your unedited opinion, unadorned with sugary toppings?

That isn't going to happen. I guarantee you everyone that is public facing at Allegorithmic has had PR training and been given a script of Adobe approved talking points that must be stuck too. Honest opinions are not allowed.

OMGC'est une catastrophe Adobe is for me as designer the by far most hated company with clunky, oversized software since 25 years now. Several generations of photographers and designers were forced to use the legendary 'Creative Suite' due to the monopoly position of Photoshop. And things around this software suite didn't develop well, the product just got more bloated and fiddled deeper in Win and Mac OS with every new generation - while some big steps were made in monetization and forced customer loyality via inflexible subscriptions.

All of this Adobe horror just didn't happen so far with that awesome allegorithmic tools from you! Superb software, good support and fair customer relationships is what we loved in the last years with allegorithmic!Now things have changed and I expect only the worst from this new business 'family'. But why for heavens sake a healthy company would put his salvation in the hands of superlarge companies who only care for shareholders value, like it happens every week somewhere? I've no answer at all, so I'm just a bit sad in face of the presumably upcoming erosion and dissapearance of allegorithmic culture, product philosophy, team spirit and excellent technology.

Thats an unexpected shock right now, anyway I wish all the best for the great Allegorithmic team and some legendary Peter Jackson moments!